ZhouX.8742

having an ai is a ranger weakness, remove it and give the skills to the actual player and you'll avoid a lot of low skill play although, if rangers were suddenly given the abilities and pets taken away, they'd be complained about more because pet ai is actually trash , regardless of it's dmg it lowers the class ceiling and being able to control skills as opposed to relying on them automatically on rng skill cycles is much more dangerous

Maybe mesmer players should have advocated for the removal of the problematic traits like IH and chronophantasm...instead mesmers were all "if you nerf those I quit"...well anet went and nerfed all around it..you reap what you sow Weird because quite a lot of mesmer players actually said that the problem is mirage cloak being busted in it's concept, something even you seem to miss. Weird huh. Also I didn't sow those seeds, go find me a post where I say "if you nerf those I quit", I dare you to try. Maybe if all those mesmer players would have stopped the whole "nerf my soft/hard counter"...you would have not ended up in a situation where nobody could stop you...that would have saved you from many nerfs, do you remember all the nerf threads started by mesmer main asking to nerf side duellists like ranger, ele etc etc? Always told you guys..the nerfs you suggest to others will inevitably come back to stab you in the back..it's a cycle No what you said was "instead mesmers were all "if you nerf those I quit"...well anet went and nerfed all around it..you reap what you sow" You generalised to include that specific wording when many "mesmer players" worth listening to were actually explaining what was wrong with mesmer and how it should be toned down. You also singled me out, probably because of a comment a month ago you didn't like about rangers, with this comment implying that you specifically direct it at me. However even a half look or noticing my posts for the last year or two you'd find many comments that are not as you make out, here's a few very recently by just checking my comments section: "It's not just sic'em, they're overloaded across the board and need slight adjustments to a lot of areas with a big hit on some of the damage mods. I'm not saying destroy ranger, just tone it down." - Quite a fair statement tbh.https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/1188790#Comment_1188790 "Buffing mesmer without addressing the problems that still persist but nerfed down into irrelevancy is a bad idea." - More details on mechanics that are broken on mesmer in the actual comment and why mesmer shouldn't be buffed without dealing with them.https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/1183839#Comment_1183839 Heck this same blooming thread: "The state of mesmer at the moment is an absolute mess, it really needs some trait reworks and optimising so that it's got clear purposes and uses without being a budget version of something else or an overpowered inescapable juggernaut of low skill clutter spam." Edit: "Always told you guys..the nerfs you suggest to others will inevitably come back to stab you in the back..it's a cycle" - it's actually really funny you say this because this is what I was saying way back when people were complaining about CI on mesmer and probably a bit before. That if they advocate for gutting a class like many asked for then don't be surprised by a lack of sympathy when it happens to you in the future. Also it's funny you generalise "mesmer mains" when here's a well known ranger main thread advocating for deleting a whole skill category when only 2 mantras were particularly over performing: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/87126/for-the-love-of-god-delete-mesmer-mantras/p1regarding mantras, it's not a question of op, it's a question of skill design and how unhealthy the concepts are for the game at a top level. if you disagree with him, just duel him and test his knowledge on the subjects he types about. shadowfall generally has a good grasp on the classes as he plays in the inners constantly and regularly plays against top players and is a good player, and i don't think what he suggests is necessarily unfair and usually quite reasonable. .

Dude's running full glass, catching all the vulnerability a LB ranger can dish out, standing in "sic em'ed" bird swipes and then cries for nerfs while calling others bad I assumed as much from his lack of HP. This is how much the bird actually hits for without buff and vuln stacking Seems pretty reasonable for a pet with 16k hp, no armor, hit's less than once a second, and still has a hard time hitting a moving target Nearly 3k per kit no buff, no debuff as a pet... You think this is ok.............. omg... Try attacking the Eagle. Its sustain is on par with one of those tiny jagged bone minions. My question would be why then jagged bone minions dont hit for even at least half of what the eagle does.I get the whole "because one is a brainless minion and the other is a trained pet" argument but thats a bit moot at this point if you are gonna use something like that as a counter argument/comparison isnt it. im not going to advocate Eagle nerfs though if any pet temps people to explore and move away from gazelle and smoke scale its honestly a good thing imo.I still want anet to look at making pure passve (non commanded) pet cc attacks have better tells though. There is 100% no reason not to do this.if rangers weren't forced to carry the pet around then we wouldn't have this discussion. because it would be optional. you answered the question yourself. minions are optional based on build, pets aren't and are tied to the class regardless of what build or strategy you run, the only thing that's optional is the pet that you use or simply have it on passive mode and not hit anything, but of course, since ranger lacks weapon coefficient damage (making it reliant on %'s not actual base dmg from weapon itself hint hint) this isn't an option and you won't kill anything and it would be stupid to do this. i think most rangers, at least good ones or somewhat decent rangers, want to have control of the pet abilities anyway or not even have a pet at all and in return get some other shit that would actually increase the skill ceiling of the ranger while also getting their weapon coefficients back because a horribly built AI isn't hitting the target automatically. people get this confused a lot, they think that the pet carries a good/decent ranger when it actually is just trash ai that lowers the skill ceiling entirely. while this might be true for a lot of casual ranger players , the good ones who actually know class matchups and are able to multi-class would benefit further by simply not having an AI at all. this is particularly probably why they haven't decided to do it because there is only a handful of decent ranger players in PvP that are still giving the class a chance. i mean they DID try this with soulbeast but it has been nerfed so much that you basically have 2-3 tradeoffs for running the spec so people have went back to core for the most part, although I still think soulbeast has SOME play still. shame too, it was such a great class idea and structure but they nerfed it completely wrong and in the wrong areas and could have retained a lot of the class's uniqueness. back then, even pre-HoT, this was solved somewhat by pets having lower damage and higher utility options, but then those got nerfed/became irrelevant due to state of the game changes see: wyverns, canines, spiders . now rangers didn't have as much dmg coming from pets, but they had exceptional utility in cc in fights that actually made a difference and could potentially turn fights. even then though, some useful skills from those pets were tied to auto attacks like tail swipe damage for example. these pets had actually somewhat useful utility when the game was simpler but then once they introduced a spam fiesta into the game and added a plethora of other shit almost all pets have become irrelevant except smokescale because of it's utility and cc. it's not that it's a rather amazing utility or pet actually, it's just 1000x better than every other pet option. now a fear from a canine for example is literally useless. pets do nothing but hinder good ranger players, because you can't explicitly control them entirely and trying to strategize around RNG is hard to do, and with that shoddy ai that , while does dmg for you automatically, is actually a hinderance and the trade off is the ranger can't get full dmg from their weapons. the 2 things you can do almost consistently is know that after smokescale's 1st attack he does a knockdown , this is ranger players simply having to work around shoddy design , not the other way around. this results in a linear, low skill ceiling class that gets complained about constantly. removing pets and allowing the ranger full control of skills in some form or fashion solves this.

It won't be long at all. Let me go ahead and share it right now actually: Marks: 3 - 3 - 2Skirm: 2 - 1 - 3Beastmaster: 3 - 2 - 2 LB: Energy & SeparationGS: Energy & Intelligence or EscapeDemolisher / Resistance 6 - We Heal As One7 - Protect Me8 - Signet Of Stone9 - Signet Of Renewal0 - Strength Of The Pack Pet 1: TigerPet 2: Bristleback "Important because it can sit to the side of fights and not take damage. The Tiger dies too quickly if kept out too long."This build has enormous toughness stack and does not require the lean on protection from wilderness, nor the condi clear. This makes it benefit more from team fight synergy from things like FB. If it really needs a prot buff, it can use protect me. It also gets a full 13 condi clear from Sig of Renewal, 2s of Resistance from Renewal, and 4s of Resistance when using Strength Of The Pack, due to Resistance Rune. This build can end a fight very quickly before ever needing to use that condi defense.Approach an opponent or it let it approach you while you are on LB side with Bristleback out. When the opponent is in melee range, swap to Greatsword and pet swap to Tiger. Hit first with Hilt Bash > Begin the Maul animation > Press the Tiger's F2 before Maul animation ends. If done correctly, when the Tiger hits he will be benefitting +50% +50% +25%. Between your Maul and the Tiger's F2 Pounce, it will 2HKO most opponents from full health. The only opponents that you should expect to survive this over-tuned Marksmanship combo are Necromancers with deep shroud bars and death line toughness stacking + protection. ~ Enjoy d/f ele with earth shield destroys this combo setup though once you blow renewal since you have no condi removal outside of escape (energy and intelligence is better anyway since you want to have crits for maul) and mitigation with resistance rune... very little condi in general. you'll get destroyed by weakness, let's not forget also weakness destroys pet dmg and pet can't even clear it outside of swap. it's fun for memes to get ranger pets nerfed more but outside of that, this like many other ranger builds will see 0 meta rep / top team rep / mAT rep esp since d/f ele is basically shaping up as a meta contender. better bruiser, better team play, better support and area denial. better off jus running soulbeast as a semi team support / bruisery role / mobile roamer. enjoy it though before pet dmg gets nerfed again :+1:

i like it when people say "it's fine because the high dmg pets also die fast so it's fine" ... this is true but the reality is every pet dies fast, tanky pets , bursty pets in AOE in 2v2's or group fights... it doesn't matter if you run a horrible tanky pet or a decent bursty pet, they both die equally as fast ... the ai is absolute trash pets are just terrible, please just remove them and give ranger control of the skills they would have and give coefficients back to the ranger weapon lines

or give viability to other pets? smokescale is good where its at, it's the other pets that bring literally nothing of utility to the table. better yet, remove pets , give us pet skill abilities on a hotbar and give us our coefficients back so we control all dmg and raise the ceiling of this class

I mean free uninterruptible stomps/resses are pretty kitten powerful, but Engineer also can do it with Elixir S, soooo. My guess is more that it was a change done to prevent you from being able to cast it while stunned. A 1/4s cast time I believe would accomplish this task. Yes because turning an oh kitten button into something unusable when kitten jumps at you makes so much sense... The whole Obsidian change is completely nonsense right from start, there was no reason to change that skill, it was totally balanced compared to other invuln skills having additional effects/rewards to the invuln and less restrictions in accessibility. Also as now proven ingame it didn't even help a tiny bit to make sustain Ele builds less tanky or remarkable less impactful in dmg while being tanky. I dont know what other invulnerability skills youre referring too, because all other invulnerability skills already locked you out of all skills. The only one that didnt is Mesmers Distortion, and even that one requires clones to have a long duration. No it is not fair when looking at other invuln skills (just see above) and when considering why the skill was originally created like that on Ele. It might be endurable on braindead facetank meta bunker builds but for more skilled and squishy builds this is a horrible nonsense change. If you want to give bunker Eles more counter and less noobfriendly facetank sustain then there are a lot of other and better ways to do that without killing one of the very few ACTIVE defense tools more squishy and more skilled Ele builds have which depend on being able to attack while invuln. No clue what makes the current balance team think they know everything better than the origin balance team from core release days, when already their inconsistent trade off mess is showing that they have at max half the competence. It is fair when looking at other invuln skills. They all lock you out of your skills. Either through channel time or literally locking them. And they also take up a utility slot, which is generally more valuable and more powerful as a result. No, as said other invuln skills have additional rewards like a stunbreak or cd refreshment (f-skills on guard) or another very impactful skill (toolbelt skill with aoe stealth to cover resustain heal from almost downstate up to 100% hp). So Obsidian was differently designed because it is different. And it is wrong to treat different things on different classes the same. Looking at rewards and cds and the class environment the design without skill lock out on Ele (just as on Mesmer) was justified, balanced and made sense since game release. And if you don't get these simple facts again, then don't be surprise i will not answer you again. Experience shows, that discussing with you is most likely a waste of time. Well, first of all that isnt true for all of them, second of all, as I said, those are utility skills. They require a greater investment than a weapon skill. Hell, Ele has another invulnerability skill, Fortify. It lasts 3 second, and is channeled while rooting yourself. So not just locked out, you cant even move. And no, not really. Obsidian Flesh has always been an absurd skill. However, it used to have a critical weakness. It required you to swap to earth, and lose access to your previous attunement for quite some time. And the earth attunement was pretty bad for the most part. But both of those are no longer true, thanks to Weaver. Earth attunement is actually quite powerful, thanks to sword, while the recharge time is drastically lower. It was always borderline broken. Now with Weaver, there aint even a borderline. These simple "facts" that arent facts. Man you really have an ego the size of the bleeding moon. Without anything to back it up. Tone it down a bit, your Superiority Complex is getting to the point of Self-Deception. ele is one of the squishiest classes with fairly low hp, it needs its invulns to survive.yea OK

they made it to function like almost all invulns but the problem is they don't test anything when they release shit so you get exploit nightmares like this imagine not doing testing on cancelling a skill to check for abnormal functionality

as long as ranger is a selectable class in gw2, it will always be complained about, it has been consistently complained about not in the meta, in the meta, utterly trash tier , god tier, etc etc pet dmg will be nerfed, hopefully they can give some life to other pets

funny thing is ranger pets WERE mostly utility before (wolf pet, drake cc) after the BM pet dmg nerf wayy back in the day and even got buffed and still aren't used because one pet outshines them (smokescale) and are now forced to run birds in off pet to produce any form of damage since low coefficients and constantly nerfed weapon sets. problem with birds is with aoe of FB , condi rev, etc your bird basically survives probably only 5seconds of the fight before getting nuked - means you need to run BM as core which takes out build options automatically since you need to run marks to produce any form of dmg even with zerker/marauder amulet since you can't pressure otherwise. pet design is trash and should honestly be removed , give us full weapon coefficients and be done with it or: have it to where theyre invisible , you have access to their skills and you do "command calls" to do their skills, they come out , do them and then dissapear again - this would give us more abilities , then you can raise back dmg coefficients and actually have full control of everythinghave pets auto attack lower dmg, let us control all pet abilitiespeople will still complain but atleast the class would be somewhat more engaging. they don't know how to balance ranger because 95% of the community is garbage at gw2 leaving 5% at the top (why the same peeps win monthly AT, those are the 5%). so you're left with shoddy design where rangers can't control pet skills even though they should thus making it annoying to fight against and deal with. lowers the skill ceiling of the class entirely. -- the facts are this, if ranger was as good as the 20 threads random scrubs sitting in silver/gold have created implied, then it would be double ranger in top comps... not even 1 is represented anywhere in top level play. it's fun to meme against bads with longbow with annoyingly situational wind ups for maximum dmg multipliers but it has no place in top tier atm in this current meta and it is a meme with no survivability.. you can have more survivability and convert ranger into a bruiser of course, buttttt d/f LR ele can do everything bruiser ranger does and has more sustain, consistent dmg uptime (not burst of course) and support and I think the only thing it lacks is roaming mobility (bird f1 -> swoop) over ranger and arguably only has maybe 1 bad matchup against FB. it's also more engaging and actually fun. they can't do balance like this with rangers. got more engaging viability with soulbeast in merging with 2 pets and using different skills - taken out and now can only use 1 dropping the ceiling even lower which is hard to do at this point with the class. don't confuse this with me saying the class is just "bad" , it's decent, but it lacks the things that could make it meta over current classes and it's shoddy pet design and longbow design will always hinder it along with community bias because it's annoying to fight against.

Explain having more defensives with builds that slot sic em for burst damage? For sic em to work you would need to slot maximum modifiers now which means you lose almost all defensives. I agree with OP in the sense of just removing it but what would even be considered a meta build for ranger in it's current state wouldn't slot sic em, it's not worth it. You need the stun breaks and condi clear from WS. The only thing you'd take it for is reveal at this point and rev can do this with GoD on a much smaller CD. This is why removing it is fine, because it'll actually weed out people who just meme ranger for damage w/ no survivability and good ranger players who know not to use it simply won't use it even more.

Its not unrealistic to do this much damage though. It wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for stealth though probably. I accept that. Ok, play against top players with it then in 1v1 and 2v2's and then play up against a top team in conquest with it in 5's in a inner server channel and see how well you do and how realistic your experience will be. It's cool to make meme forum threads about it but in reality against people with brains it's a useless concept and gets you auto focused and a liability. This is sort of why you haven't seen a 1 shot build in probably any monthly AT semifinal/final ever in it's history and also in any top competitive game that's streamed or showcased, I wonder why? Because it's utter trash. There's just much better options because conquest isn't about doing a 1 hit wonder then being a focus target for the other 95% of that time because you have no defensive utilities because you slotted everything in traits and utilities for dmg modifiers. Also, stealth? Reveal exists , it's the simplest counter to a 1shot ranger build if you even need a counter, which you don't, again because it's an auto focus build even more focus-able than necro now.

I don't even think many use sic em anymore since it was nerfed before but I can see your point on the multiplicative dmg modification so I could agree with just removing it... So many top rangers would care less if it was removed... It'll only stop the memers running high dmg no survivability builds then they'll move on to another class. But we both know, even when they remove Sic em they will still complain about ranger because ranger was complained before sic em was even remotely considered a utility worth slotting back in the day. Thieves don't like sic em because 2k range reveal, not so much the dmg modifier esp now since d/p is sort of the go to now because higher condi = shadow arts.

"I can't play a busted class on easy mode and farm wins instead of learning matchups and actually getting better" You won't be missed, these people are the reason PvP can't ever see consistent balance.

No can do. Against non-outlyingly strong builds, these things are not actually exaggerations. Plus, I have bigger fish to fry. non outlying strong builds :) barely any monthly AT presence in NA "strong builds" barely any representation amongst good players because other classes do better - cough D/F LR Ele , Necro , Condi Rev, FB, thief... "strong builds" :)